Soft Spot
by Rasberry Parfait
Summary: Noah is a pessimist, and as such, hard to impress. But Izzy impresses him, and she makes it look easy. A glimpse into our favorite jerk's mind.


A/N: I always liked this couple. No offense to Owen, of course. He's bomb, I just liked Izzy better with Noah.

In any case, this story marks the end of my period of darkness and gloom in which I was too busy dodging the bullet of summer school racing towards me to even think about writing, thank you very much.

It's a third-person glimpse into Noah's head, part character study but mostly just IzzyXNoah friendship study. You can take it as romance if you so wish, like I do.

Disclaimer: I wish.

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Noah is a pessimist. That isn't a secret. And as such, there is a long, long list of things he dislikes in people, and a very short one of things that he likes. That's illogical, of course, because for every bad quality a person can have, there is an opposite good one-and one of the things on the top of his list is not making any sense, so he reasons that he's just better at picking out bad qualities in people than good ones. Because he's a pessimist. So that makes sense.

Mind you, he hasn't actually written down these lists, because that would just be sad, and even he doesn't have that much free time on his hands, but he has a vague idea of what bothers him more than others, and he knows that if he ever were to put his lists on paper, at the very top of the list of things he hates in people would be fakeness, which isn't really word, but it seems more accurate than, say, insincerity, which implies dishonesty in the form of outright lies, and the thing that bothers him most is the act of pretending to be someone that you're not, to impress someone else.

It's not so much an issue of truth, really. He's not used to people being honest; he doesn't expect them to be honest. He's used to double checking everything and relying on himself to keep from being screwed over in life. That's not the issue. It's like this:  
Noah knows that he irritates people. He knows that people don't like the fact that he's a pessimist and a know-it-all and on and on. And sometimes, it bothers him. Sometimes, though these times are few and far-between, and he will never, ever admit it to anyone, he does wish he had more friends. And maybe it's human nature to be so. But it's human nature to be a lot of things, and he's not a caveman. He doesn't rely on instinct, he relies on logic, because instinct was designed for a world that's changed beyond it's usefulness, whereas logic consists of standing in front of the fork in the road, to make use of the usual cliché, and base your decision on the individual situation. Which makes a lot more sense.

But to continue. Even if, occasionally, he feels the instinctive urge to conform to what is expected of him by his peers, he has the intelligence not to give in to those instincts and keep on being the sarcastic, pessimistic, know-it-all that he really is.

That being said, the bottom line is that if he has the integrity to not give a crap about what other people think, then others should, too. Unfortunately, he hasn't met many people that satisfy that. Before he met Izzy.

Bear in mind that Noah didn't immediately take a liking to the redhead. In fact, it might not be too far out of the park to say that she was initially his least-favorite person on the island. Noah always wanted things to make sense, and Izzy never did, and maybe that scared him a little. Everyone else was predictable. People, in general, were predictable, and now that he'd met the exception that proved the rule, he wasn't sure he liked her.

But somehow, and he's not sure when or why or how, he started noticing things. For one thing, she was smart, probably as smart as he was, if not in the same way. Noah could tell you who wrote Oliver Twist and the exact date that Amelia Earhart was declared dead. Izzy couldn't tell you either of those things (she would probably say that the first one was a trick question and that Oliver Twist was the fifty-ninth president of the U.S., and if you asked her how she knew, she'd say, in that mischievous tone, "Wouldn't you like to know?" and walk away and leave you wondering, and he didn't even want to think about what she'd say to the second one, and he wondered vaguely why he'd even thought about what she'd say to the first one, and immediately knew that he could never tell anyone about it, since he got enough crap from the whole 'Cody' thing, and it's not like he would tell anyone anyway, really, so what was the point of having to decide that?) But she's creative and resourceful and could tell you, from experience, how to make a sail out of dental floss, chewing gum and a paper clip.

For another thing, she's independent. She knows everyone thinks she's insane, and she doesn't care. She keeps not making any sense, and he can deny the fact that he respects that.

She's also strong and not too into herself and a million other things that make her so much more tolerable than 90% of the rest of the world. In fact, though he knows he won't admit it, he actually considers Izzy a-he can't believe he's actually thinking the word-_friend. _It's a foreign concept to him, really, but not as irritating as he expects it to be, and that, in and of itself, irritates him to no end, because he might actually be going soft to the world. (And yes, he considers himself a strong individual, maybe not in the I-was-in-the-navy-check-out-my-tattoos sense, or Heaven forbid the in-it-to-win-it-my-favorite-movie-is-_Remember the Titans, _football jock type, but in his own, screwed up way, sure.)

But then he thinks, he's not going soft to the world. He's just developed a soft spot for Izzy-one person, and one who can hardly be called an accurate representation of the rest of the world. That's the reason the soft spot developed in the first place.

And even if that were not the case, well-it's _Izzy. _She can resist Justin, the Anti-Noah, his sworn enemy, longer than anyone else he knows.

So even if he is going soft because of her, she's totally worth it.

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A/N: Don't bag on me for the Remember the Titans diss. Of course I don't think that movie's stupid. But it's **Noah. **(Just for the record, his name was supposed to be in italics just now, but for some reason the italics on my computer won't work. It's making me mad. Gr...)


End file.
